India Narrative

Heavily-armed terrorists swooped on the village Wandhama, now in Central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district, on Lailatul Qaddr, the holiest night of the holy month of Ramzan, on the eve of the Indian Republic Day, January 25/26, 1998. While all the Muslims were busy with the nightlong prayers at the local community mosque, the resident Pandits and their guests were dragged out on the gun point. Twenty-three of them, including nine women and four children, were mercilessly massacred. It was for the first time after the killing of seven Pandits at Sangrampora, Budgam, on 21 March 1997, that this big number of the members of the minority community was gunned down at one place. A pall of gloom engulfed the whole of Kashmir valley, with nobody daring to publicly condemn the carnage but everybody looking melancholic. There were scenes of mourning across the ripples from Ganderbal where the revered Kheer Bhawani temple shrine stands at Tulmulla. Obviously the bloodshed had an impact on the Republic

Polarisation between the political Right and Left has grown phenomenal in India particularly after a high-octane demonstrate at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to commemorate the execution of the once JKLF activist and the alleged Jaish-e-Mohammad operative Afzal Guru in February 2016. Notwithstanding the JNU’s in-house inquiry, coupled with an investigation by the Delhi Police, the identities of the participants are still shrouded in a mystery. None of the male or female characters in the choreography, whose faces were clearly captured by scores of the cameras, figures in the Delhi Police charge-sheet. On that occasion, the BJP leadership at the Centre reportedly believed that the identification would lead to the arrest of a number of young men and women from Kashmir. This, as per the BJP’s apprehension, would queer the pitch for continuation of the ruling coalition with the PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti. Mehbooba’s father, Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, had died a month